“The shipment of transuranic wastes from generator sites to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico is set to resume in April. The US Department of Energy (DoE) expects a total of 128 shipments to be made to WIPP over the next 12 months.”

​Yesterday, The Hill reported that President-elect Trump’s budget blueprint would eliminate funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, and privatize the Corporation for Public Broadcasting with the goal of reducing federal spending by trillions over the next decade. The budget blueprint itself has not yet been produced and would be a non-binding document. We are at the very beginning of the federal appropriations process. We do not expect the President’s budget to be released until April. The House and Senate will each soon begin work on the annual appropriations process. Each chamber must pass its own spending bills and then come to agreement on spending for the year before sending bills to the president to be signed into law. Fortunately, there is a solid foundation of bipartisan arts advocacy and support over the years.

“Friday, September 9, the town of Exeter, New Hampshire celebrates the removal of the Great Dam and the restoration of the Exeter River. The town will hold a public ceremony in Founders Park at 10am.

There have been dams along the Exeter River since the 1640s or so. The Great Dam, named for the nearby Great Falls, was built around 1831 to provide power to Exeter’s mills. After coal and oil power came to Exeter, the Great Dam continued to provide power to Exeter businesses into the mid-20th century. When the dam’s owner sold the dam and factories in 1981, the Great Dam was donated to the Town of Exeter.

With the need for the dam gone, the Great Dam fell into disrepair. In 2000, the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services advised the town that the dam had serious safety and flooding issues. The Town considered repairing, modifying, or removing the dam, and finally decided that removing the dam was the best solution.

Katherine Ellen Foley on the problem with “clean” hydropower. “Globally, the reservoirs created by dams may actually contribute almost a gigaton of carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions—about 25% more than they had previously thought. This means that we’ve almost certainly been underestimating how much greenhouse gas we’ve been shooting into the atmosphere.”

Another reason to let rivers run their natural course….too late to stop China’s 3 River Dam on Yangtze.

“Since April, over 3000 Native American people have been camping in Cannon Ball, North Dakota. They are trying to stop the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, which would run underneath the Missouri river near the Cheyenne river reservation.”